Self-justification - Insufficient Justification

Insufficient Justification

If people have too much external justification for their actions, cognitive dissonance will not occur, and thus, attitude change is unlikely to occur. On the other hand, when people cannot find external justification for their behavior, they must attempt to find internal justification – they reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors.

The theory of insufficient justification has many applications in education and child rearing. A study by Aronson & Carlsmith illustrates the results of external rewards in the classroom. They told a classroom full of preschoolers not to play with an attractive toy, threatening half with a mild punishment and half with a severe punishment if they did play with it, and then left the room. None of the children played with the toy. When the researchers came back, they asked the children to rate the attractiveness of the toy. Those who had been threatened with severe punishment still rated it as very attractive; these children had large external justification for not playing with the toy, and so their attitudes had not changed. However, those who had only been threatened with a mild punishment rated the toy as significantly less attractive; without much external justification for not playing with the toy, they had to create internal justifications to reduce their dissonance.

This study can be very useful to parents who use punishment to help teach their children good values. The milder the punishment used, the more children will have to develop internal justification for behaving well. Similarly, if educators want children to internalize their lessons and develop a love of learning, they must help the children find internal justifications for their schoolwork, and minimize externals rewards.

Relatedly, the hypocrisy induction – a form of strong internal justification for changing attitudes and behaviors - has been used in recent decades to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. The hypocrisy induction is the arousal of dissonance by having individuals make statements that do not align with their own beliefs, and then drawing attention to the inconsistencies between what they advocated and their own behaviors, with the overall goal of leading individuals to more responsible behaviors. In 1991, Aronson and colleagues asked two groups of college students to compose a speech describing the dangers of HIV/AIDS and advocating the use of condoms during every sexual encounter. One group just composed the arguments; the other also recorded their arguments in front of a video camera that they were told was going to be seen by an auditorium of high school students. Additionally, half the students in each group were made mindful of their own failings to use condoms. The researchers found that the students who had made the video and thought about their own behaviors – they had the highest level of internal justification and thus the highest dissonance condition – were far more likely to buy condoms afterwards than the students in any other group. Those who only performed a single action, like composing the written arguments, were much more easily able to attribute what they were doing to external justification (i.e.- I’m doing this because the researcher told me to.) Furthermore, they found these results to be steady even several months after the study concluded.